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Telstra buys into Chinese API specialist

By Petroc Wilton

Telstra’s Ventures arm has made a strategic investment into Cloopen, a Beijing-based firm that specialises in Chinese communications application programming interfaces that enables developers to integrate messaging, voice and video calls in apps. While the quantum of the investment was not disclosed, Telstra Ventures typically spends between US$5-10 million on individual projects.

According to Telstra, the move increases its exposure to the rapidly expanding over-the-top market in China and, in return, gives Cloopen access to Telstra’s own large customer base in the APAC region, where the telco is pushing to expand. “With the complex nature of the telecommunications infrastructure in China and different local polic

ies and business practices in each province, Cloopen meets the need among application developers for simplified communications capabilities,” said Telstra Ventures MD Matthew Koertge. “As a platform-as-a-service provider, Cloopen can easily integrate a set of communications APIs into applications that provide services such as car-hailing or meal delivery, which are booming in China, to enable functions like application-to-people voice and messaging, two factor verification, and video conferencing. It can ease the complexity for application developers to work with multiple telecom operators to equip applications with these communications capabilities,” he added.

“Cloopen is the only internet -based cloud communication PaaS provider with this breadth of communications capabilities in China. Currently, more than 150,000 registered developers, including Tencent and Alibaba, are using the platform to build their applications.”